As I Walked Down New Grub Street

As... I Walked ,Down New Grub Street , ; ; -i Memories of a Writing Life WALTER ALLEN The University of Chicago Press ;:::1 The University of~hicago Press to'Peggy Chicago, 60637 William Heinemann Ltd, London W1X 9P A © 1981 by Walter Allen All rights reserved Published 1981 Published with financial assistance from the Arts Council of Great Britain ISBN 0--226-01433--9 Library of Congress Catalog Card No: 81--69852 PR ('.POO I ' ""1 "') ,. I '-,I (" I ;;;_ <"f !{-Vi f Printed in Great Britain the scholarship, rhymed roughly with 'bally fool'. In those days, there 'Sir', which I feared was sardonic. I felt he had sized me up. I was was only one scholarship in English at Oxford. The set books were six getting hungry again but I was too shy or gauche to ask him when Shakespeare plays, Milton's English poetry, six of johnson's Lives and dinner was served or where. Culture and Anar~hy. The plays and the Lives were not entirely new to The evening d'ragged on, the room never became warm, the me, but most of the Milton was. Since no one from the staff could be grarriophones mocked. I was very hungry but dared not go to a spared from his other teaching to coach me, I had to master them restaurant again, for my tea had proved more expensive than I'd myself as best I could. I could only have been miserably unprepared, 'expected. I wrote two falsely cheerfnlletters: I felt as a child must feel though I was confident as I have never been since. on its first night in hospital among the dazzling, sterilised whiteness On a cold, raw, early December day I made the journey to Oxford. ,and the bright impersonal nurses. It was the early days of vacation and there were still some undergradu I must have found Hall in time for breakfast next morning, for I ates up; I have the impression now of tall, self-possessed young men, remember no more problems about meals. But the isolation, or the most of them blond with college scarves round their necks and of sense of it, persisted. It was a lack of grace in me, but it was gramophones with horns playing in college windows. I was put in inescapable. As I recall, there were over a hundred ~andidates in for rooms occupied in term by a man I knew was the son of a former Lord the examination and, as I eyed them, they seemed to know one Mayor of Birmingham. In his autobiography Pack My Bag, Henry another intimately and half Balliol besides. In the five or six meals I Green comments on the lack of comfort at Oxford after Eton: I was ate in Hall I think I spoke to only one boy and then because he spoke amazed that one person could possess two such rooms for his sole use. I to me first. He was a tall, handsome youth with a scar down his left felt awkward and embarrassed, very much an intruder. I examined the cheek. He wore a grey flannel suit and was at Shrewsbury, which was books on the shelves. They told me nothing: brown limp volumes of the name of the house I'd been in at my elementary school. I liked him Plato and the Greek tragic poets in Greek,-which I didn't understand, enormously but I was tongue-tied and could say nothing more than some Jane Austen and Kipling, representative works of E. V. Knox yes and no. I must have seemed insufferably churlish. and A. P. Herbert. I was miserably conscious and bitterly ashamed of the envy and My self-confidence was shrinking. I didn't know what to do; for rancour I felt. I had not known I possessed them. And I was intimi some reason, I expected someone to come and look for me, someone I dated by my surroundings, by the hall with its enormous open fires, would be accountable to. I was unused to freedom. I was hungry; it the like of which I had not seen before, by the portraits of the College was drizzling outside, and I was cold, and though the fire was laid I worthies that look down from the walls, Matthew Arnold with his did not light it for fear of offending. I roamed Balliol in vain, and for prim and supercilious air among them, by the bright young dons who my three days' sojourn Balliol remained a college without water- supervised the examination, some of whom seemed scarcely older , closets. Percipiently, the City of Oxford had placed public lavatories than the examinees. As for the examination papers, they terrified me. in the Broad just by the college ,gates, and to these I repaired when it I could see they were much more intelligent than any I had met before was necessary. and demanded a wider and more accurate knowledge than I ppssessed. I went to the Cadena for tea and probably had herring roes on toast, The ordeal ended, I left Oxford on the first possible train. Next for that was my current notion of high living. I bought a packet of morning, Joe eagerly studied the papers and approved my choice of Players' cigarettes, and my self-esteem rose when a charming young questions. I did not tell anyone how wretched I had been. Weeks man came over from a nearby table and asked me for a light. By the later, Joe showed me a copy of the Manchester Guardian containing the time I returned to Balliol, my self-esteem had guttered. It was dark results: the scholarship had been won by a man already at Balliol. Joe now, and the gramophones were louder. Forlorn and cold, in despera said he would write and find out my marks. Ifhe did, he had pity on tion I lit the fire and crouched over the unimpressive flames, reading me, for he never told me. Knox and Herbert, neither of whom I found remarkably funny. The For years, I could not remember that episode in my life without scout arrived, and I felt I had done wrong in lighting the fire. He was squirming. No doubt it was a salutary experience, for it compelled 'a a brusq ue, bustling man, very neat in an Army way, and he called me truer estimate of myself. All the same, I wish it had been less painful 26 27 or I had been more prepared for it. As it was, it exacerbated a sense of Oxford and Cambridge are free. class and class-privilege that I have never wholly freed myself of. For Of the two, I have always felt closer to Oxford, as the more me, men on strike always have justice on their side. sympathetic, possibly because it was the choice of my childish parti It also conditioned for good my responses to Oxford, which have sanship on Boat'Race Day. Towards Cambridge I can be cool as remained ambivalent. When I went to live as a writer in London in , towards a market town deep in the Fens and even find it a trifle the Thirties, I was struck by the way it was assumed that I was a , provincial and priggish. I have been much more frequently to Oxford university man, meaning by that of either Oxford or Cambridge and, , and have always had more and closer friends' there. My attitude to it of in my case it seemed, Oxford rather than not. It became a point of love-and-hate seems enshrined now in a visit I made in the summer of honour to assert that I was a graduate of Birmingham, thank you, for 1955 to Christ Church, as the guest of the young Norman St John the assumption that I must be of Oxford seemed to me only another Stevas, whom I had met at about this time on the Society of Authors' example, conscious or not, of the snobbery of the English. This, I see committee under Sir Alan Herbert that was looking into the law now, was absurd. Even I, who had a vested interest in such matters, relating to obscenity. St John-Stevas was then a law student at Christ knew of only one other writer among my immediate contemporaries Church. My visit proved a mixed delight. Dinner was enjoyable; I'sat who was a product of a provincial university. That was Rayner next to J. I. M. Stewart, who was the English don in the college and Heppenstall from Leeds. My friend Henry Reed was still unpublished had come in to dine that evening in order to meet me. That was and unknown. And before us? Gissing, Lawrence, Brett Young, gratifying. After dinner, we adjourned to the Senior Common Room, Herbert Read cannot exhaust the list, but the names of the others do if that is its proper name, for the ritual drinking of port. St John not come precisely trippingly to the tongue. Even in the Thirties, if a Stevas suggested that we should ignore the port and continue drink young English writer had a university education, you more or less had ing claret, which we did. When we had finished the bottle my to assume that the university was either Oxford or Cambridge. neighbour, who was Roy Harrod, urged me to have some port. It was, Nowadays, the assumption is much less safe and is made much less he said, very good. But the port had been three times round the table, automatically.

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